I've never really been camping before, so when a friend asked if I wanted to go camping over Labor Day weekend, I gladly accepted. In the past, I've mentioned that living in the truck feels like perpetual camping. Think about it: I practically live outside, I forgo a lot of modern conveniences (namely heat, A/C, and a nearby bathroom), and I fall asleep to the sounds of nature every night (there's a shocking amount of wildlife at the edge of my parking lot). So I expected camping to feel like just another day for me, and I packed for it almost like I'd pack for a normal day: a few t-shirts, a pair of shorts, and my handy dandy battery pack. So, how was it?

When your entire life fits in a parking space, leaving it for a few days (on twenty minutes of notice) is super easy. There's no sense of homesickness or yearning for first-world amenities. You never catch yourself thinking, "Gee, I miss my television and refrigerator right now"...because you didn't have those things to begin with. In the same vein, because you have so little to even consider bringing with you, the cognitive overhead for packing is minimal. In a house overflowing with assorted objects of questionable utility, you have to mentally iterate through them and decide what makes sense to bring with you on a three-day excursion. Like I said above, I just tossed all my useful belongings in a bag, and that was that. Granted, if I was camping alone or with other truck people, this wouldn't have worked in the slightest. It's only because everyone else was able to bring things like tents, utensils, and food that I was able to pack so lightly.

As for the actual weekend, it was a total blast. There wasn't anything truck-related for the three days I was away, save for my recounting of a few particularly strange truck stories,. I certainly didn't drive the truck to the campgrounds, I doubt it would even have survived the journey. It was just three days of cooking over an open fire, stargazing with a clear view of the Milky Way, drinking to excess, and swimming in a lake of questionable quality water, all perfectly legitimate camping activities.

It wasn't entirely sunshine and rainbows though. Sleeping on the cold, hard ground did make me miss my truck bed a little bit, and it's true that I've been pampered by my corporate fitness and hygiene facilities over the past few months. We did have a bathroom at the campsite, which came with a complimentary coating of dirt and a potpourri of random insect infestations. Several bouts of tiny, uninvited truck guests have made me pretty unconcerned with bugs, so I definitely appreciated the unintentional conditioning. Those negligible gripes aside (one could and should even consider them part of the experience), truck life was good preparation for camping, and in turn, camping was a nice departure from truck life.

I like to think I'm pretty environmentally friendly. I try to minimize my waste, take quick showers, and not run unnecessary appliances, like heating and cooling systems. I'm definitely not a super earthy-crunchy-Hippie-type, but I'm at least vaguely cognizant of the atrocities I commit against Mother Nature. My main sin against the planet, aside from just being American, is the fact that I run errands in an 11,500 pound tank that gets 8 MPG on a good day. That's bad for at least four different reasons, in no particular order:

1. I weigh ~170 pounds, it's wildly inefficient for me to haul six tons of metal with me to a cafe.
2. As it turns out, the truck doesn't just fold up and fit in my pocket once I get somewhere. I have to park the stupid thing, and I've noted before how that isn't always easy.
3. It's also my home. And really, it makes a better home than mode of transportation. Plus, I invariably forget to secure something, and the next time in the box becomes a game of "find and pick up all the stuff that was violently thrown around while you were driving". The joy.
4. It costs money. I like having money, it's better than not having money because I spent it on 100 million year old plants (read: gasoline) to please my truck-beast.

So, you can imagine my elation when I found out that my company was piloting an electric bicycle program. Looking at the list of Bad Things^TM above, here's how an electric bike would make my life better:

1. It weighs like 50 pounds, which is ~99.6% less than the truck. Much more efficient for moving me places.
2. Parking a bicycle is infinitely easier than a 20-something foot long truck.
3. Bicycles are made for taking people places. Moving trucks are meant for taking things places. I'm glad to no longer be forcing a square peg into a round hole.
4. It's free! It's mine to use as long as I stay with my current employer. I can charge it up at work, and it gets 25+ miles on a single charge. That's enough for a trip to my mailbox and a few local errands.

So naturally, I signed up for the program, did the training, and picked up my shiny new toy. The bike is a Specialized Turbo. It's a pedalec, which means that it only helps me move along, it doesn't do all the work like a motorcycle would. It has a torque-sensor, so it puts in effort proportional to my own. This is all great, because frankly my cardio sucks, and I can't be bothered to actively work on it. But when you incorporate it into my daily routine, and also let me do it at almost 30 MPH (I got a motorcycle license just so I could get the faster version), I'm much more inclined to play along. I've only had it for four days, but I've already racked up 50 miles on it. I bought a bike rack for the truck so I can take it places with me, but I haven't installed that yet. I'll save that for a separate "Home Improvement" post.

I'm still working out little details, like where I want to mount the rack in the truck (not that there are a ton of choices), and how to get it in and out of the truck smoothly (it's 50 pounds and awkward to maneuver), but overall it's been a total boon to my routine.

It's been a while since my last Home Improvement post, which is bad because it means I'm not improving the truck. And trust me, the truck certainly does have areas for improvement. Anyway, I mentioned that I got a new bike recently. This was great but, like every time I get something new, it posed an issue.

The Situation

I'm now in possession of a large, 50 pound hunk of metal and rubber, which I have to store somewhere. It makes sense to keep it with me, because:

1. It's a $3,000+ piece of equipment
2. For some reason bikes in the Bay Area are especially prone to being stolen
3. It just seems silly to keep it anywhere else. If I have to go get it every time I want to use it, doesn't that defeat the purpose? Seriously, who wants to pregame their bike ride with a half-mile walk.^{Certainly not me}

So I made the pretty easy decision to keep the bike safe and sound in the truck when I'm using it. That's all well and good and whatnot, but what happens when I need to drive somewhere? The bike won't stay standing on its own, especially not with my abrupt and punctuated driving style. I'm not just going to lay it down, tie some rope around it, and hope for the best. It has all sorts of fancy parts (derailleur, electric motor, torque sensor, lights, disc brakes, etc), and leaving it to rattle around in the back sounds like a great way to totally and needlessly ruin it. My general strategy for having nice things is to not break them, and I'm going to try my darnedest to keep it up.

Planning It Out

So I did some preliminary research. I'm in the unique position of having to choose between a home bike rack and a car bike rack. In either case, I knew I needed something pretty heavy duty to accommodate the weight of this bike in all of its electric, motored glory. I quickly realized a home rack wouldn't work out well, because those racks aren't expecting a ton of movement, so they don't bother with any shock-resistance, which could potentially warp the frame of the bike or toss it off the rack if I went over a bump hard enough. After a bit of searching, I decided on a Truck Bed Bike Rack. I figured that the box is basically a giant truck bed, and I could probably finagle the clamps on properly…somehow. Plus, the bike being upright but on the ground means that I don't have to worry about it falling, like I would for a ceiling mount or some other fancy wall mount. I placed my order, waited a few days for it to come in, then it was time to get my hands dirty, proverbially speaking.*

Now if you've looked at my past "Home Improvement" posts, there's a pretty consistent theme: I inevitably get something horribly wrong and make my life unnecessarily difficult due to my thorough lack of understanding about how the physical world works. I'm a software engineer: I move electrons and pixels, not wood and metal. Per usual, my problem was that I didn't properly do my research. I was hoping I'd be able to clamp the wooden slats along the sides of the truck in the same way they'd clamp onto the edge of a truck bed. Well, I should have done less hoping, and more measuring, because the wooden slats were ever-so slightly too tall to properly clamp onto, and ever-so slightly too close to the truck wall for the thickness of the clamp.

Screwing Stuff Together

Discouraged, but far from ready to admit defeat, I paced around the back of the truck, at the time parked in a random parking lot. After a short eternity, I realized I could unscrew the wooden slat, place the back half of the clamp against the wall, and then pin it into place by screwing the slat back in. The clamp still didn't fit around the wood correctly, but I figured if I tightened it really, really, really well, I could dig the metal clamp straight into the wood, and hopefully that would be stable enough to keep the bike in place. I executed my new plan, gave a couple tugs on the connecting rod as a test (which elicited a cacophony of creaks), and then put the bike into place, wrapping the clamp around the seatpost.

The end result? So far, good. I drove about a mile with the bike secured in the back and it appeared to survive unscathed, no implosions or loss of life. I'm not yet confident enough to claim that a particularly sharp turn won't just rip the wood slat out of the wall and send the bike crashing to the ground, but I've got my fingers crossed.

*_{The truck is actually pretty clean, I sweep it at least once a week.}

Wow, that was intense. This blog used to just be for my family and friends to check in and make sure I hadn't died in some horrific truck-related accident, but since I made the highly questionable call to share my story publicly, it's been a whole different story all together. It's been a crazy few days, and I have a ton of thoughts on it. This is going to be my longest post by far, and I apologize in advance if it reads like one long rambling truck-man manifesto. I'm going to do my best to sort my thoughts out, so strap in and here we go.

Raw Stats

I'm not going to link to any of them, but there were well over 6,000,000 (yes, six million) views on articles about my living situation in the first day and a half. I've seen various forms of my story published on 25+ media outlets, and several live news broadcasts. This blog received 2,000,000 requests the first day alone, enough to bring it down for a minute or two right after the first article hit. I've been contacted by no less than 10 people internally at my company, 20 people externally, and 500 people between comments on this blog and emails. A few people tracked me down and friended me on social media (impressive, I'm not even mad). By any definition, my story went viral, for better or for worse.

The Good

I've read emails from many people who've subjected themselves to living situations similar to mine, sometimes under less cheery circumstances. Even though I'm perfectly contented with my (self-inflicted) living situation, it was encouraging to read from other people who've worked through the same physical and cognitive barriers. I've even heard from people who are currently living in nearly identical situations. I've never had a network of fellow truck/van-dwellers to talk to (this guy has since left), so if nothing else it's nice to know that other people are just as crazy as I am. The tone of peoples' correspondences to me was overwhelmingly positive, and that was definitely refreshing. I've read through tons of wonderful advice about potential "Home Improvement" tasks, like fixing that damned hole in the front of the box, ways I can improve my dresser, or how I could build a better bike rack. I've had people offer to decorate the inside and outside of the truck, and even offer me places to stay around the world when I start travelling. The kindness and generosity of the world is certainly not lost on me, and I appreciate all of it greatly.

Real Conversations

I have dozens of reasons why I do what I do, but the easiest one to latch onto is that the Bay Area is expensive to live in, and I normally leave it at that. It turns out that's a fantastically touchy subject, but it was nice to see some very well-reasoned arguments on a bevy of relevant topics. I read some great discussions: whether they be about what the "American Dream" means today, or even solutions for San Francisco to start rectifying its housing problem. Though I have to admit, it's incredibly weird watching thousands of complete strangers argue about the various facets of your life. Glad that's almost over with.

In The Black

We're living in Marty McFly's future, and (according to my nearly arbitrary formula) I've broke even! I've successfully avoided paying rent for long enough to justify purchasing the truck, and it's all sunshine and gravy from here. I promised a break-even party, and I'm still working out the details, but that'll definitely be this weekend for anyone who wants to join in the festivities. Thank you to every one who congratulated me on this pretty exciting (if I do say so myself) milestone.

The Bad

There were a lot of great things that came out of the past few days, but unfortunately the Internet isn't a vast wonderland of sunshine and rainbows. While everyone I've talked to in real-life has been, at the very least, understanding of what I'm doing, the anonymous, snarled tendrils of the Web aren't quite as forgiving. Maybe I can chock up the local niceness to the general liberalness and frivolousness that pervades the Bay Area, who knows? In any case, I certainly had a lot of material to think about and reflect on over the course of the day.

Common Criticisms/Complaints/Comments

For better or for worse, the Internet is a bastion of free speech and gives people the power of anonymity. Having spent years taking cursory glances at YouTube comments, I should have known better than to delve into the cesspool otherwise known as the comments section on articles. But alas, I let curiosity get the best of me and took a look. I'm the last person who'd be offended by comments on the Internet, and I've mentioned before that if you're going to do something as crazy and fringe as live in a truck, you need to be comfortable with yourself. Being comfortable means knowing how to take a joke, and I found most of the jokes about me pretty funny. Some of them were tragically misinformed or otherwise unknowledgeable though, and here's my feeble attempt to set the record straight:

• The Stuffed Animals. I'm not actually sure how this came up in the first place, but the dregs of the Internet really latched onto the fact that I own a few stuffed animals, and that fact persisted through pretty much every article I read. And I'll admit, as a grown man living in a truck, stuffed animals are about the only decoration that could possibly make my living situation look any creepier. Plus, if you presented a younger version of me with that information, he'd probably find the stuffed animals just as weird. The reality is that they were given to me by a friend, and they're one of the few possessions I've attached sentiment to. Everything else in the truck has a well-defined utility and purpose, the stuffed animals are just reminders that I've lived other lives outside of my current situation. I don't talk to them or pretend they're alive, I just keep them to remember where I've been. So yeah, they're undoubtedly weird, but they're also one of the signs that I'm still human.
• I'm a barbarian. I don't pee in the woods. I've never peed in the woods, and I have no intention of peeing in the woods. I use the facilities on campus, like a reasonable, civilized human being. There are no buckets or other waste capture/disposal utilities in the truck. I repeat: While in the truck, I perform no bodily function that creates waste. Okay fine, if you're being particularly pedantic, I do breathe, which releases CO₂ and I guess could be considered waste, but that's it. I'm not Bear Grylls, nor do I have any intention of emulating his lifestyle.
• Non-existent social/romantic life. I'm working on being less judgmental myself, so I'm not going to give people flak for their opinions of me. And trust me, I'm the first one to joke about my romantic prospects. But since everyone seemed really worked up about it: you can take solace in knowing that I have a great network of friends, and people are far more accepting of the truck life than I would have previously believed. People seemed really eager to paint me as some sort of goblin who works 16 hours a day and is afraid of sunlight and women, which I probably should have expected.

Just Plain Selfish

I can't remember what was going through my head when I agreed to talk about this publicly, but it's pretty much the exact opposite of everything I've been advocating in my lifestyle. You know, things like subtlety, for example. The whole reason I got a truck instead of an RV was to maintain a low profile, well it turns out that works much better if you don't broadcast pictures of your truck on Good Morning America (my bad). The worst part though is that, as I've mentioned, there are plenty of other people in the area doing similar things, and I very well may have just ruined it for everyone by drawing so much attention to it. I sincerely hope that I haven't caused problems for any other truck people. If I have, I'm sorry, it was selfish of me to make such a spectacle of myself.

What makes me interesting?

If you aren't a fan of hearing about the grim realities of the world, skip this section.

Over 600,000 people in the United States are homeless, and we're the most affluent nation on the planet. By that metric, there's nothing particularly interesting about my flavor of homelessness. It's that I'm choosing to do so, or that I'm doing it while working at a high-profile tech company. And somehow that makes it more interesting, or fun even? Real homelessness is a systemic issue that doesn't get exposure because it's a decidedly uncomfortable topic. People barely scraping by working minimum wage jobs and living out of their cars isn't a news story, or particularly glamorous. My story makes a great, Buzzfeed-style headline. But when it comes down to it, my life is perfectly fine. I've said many times before that in my worst case scenario, I simply get an apartment like a normal human being. But where are the stories for the people who don't have that luxury? Let's be incredibly clear about this: If I was struggling to get by and living out of a car, this wouldn't be news; it'd just be someone's harsh reality. It's especially tragic because I encouraged it, generating tens of thousands of dollars in ad revenue for these media outlets.* If this is something that resonates with you, donate to an organization that actually does something about it, like HandUp or Homeless Voice.

Clarification

I saw a lot of misinformation and questions and criticisms in the comments on various sites. For all of the questions people asked me directly on this site, I'll address them all in a mega-Q&A soon, so sit tight. But I'm going to address some of the bigger stuff here.

Brandon, where's your money?

I saw a bunch of people crunched the numbers and determined that I should have been able to save more money than I actually am and pay down my loans faster. However, they weren't able to take into account that I was maxing out my 401k and HSA to lower my tax burden and utilize the generous corporate matching program available to me. Those investments have higher returns than the fairly low interest rate on my federal loans. Fear not, I'm working on a post that'll detail my finances in thorough, painstaking detail. But in the meantime, rest assured that I don't have a raging drug addiction that's siphoning up my hard-earned funds.

Brandon, why is your truck so ugly?

As is pretty obvious from the truck shots circulating the Internet: my home is not a pretty place. In fact, I'd venture as far as saying it's downright unattractive. It's fairly old, there's graffiti and old sticker residue on the outside, etc. I do my best to keep it away from the public eye, but I thought it was funny that people were expecting something nicer. Like in what universe is someone living in a truck likely to have high-class design sensibilities? I'm an engineer, and it definitely shows in my choice of decor. It's spartan and utilitarian, and that's the way I like it. Like I've said before, I'm not using it to impress house guests, I'm using it to sleep and store my clothes, nothing more.

The Savings Clock

Brandon, in this post, you say your break-even point isn't until October 21^st, 2015, but it looks like you broke even yesterday, October 19^th. What gives?

This one was my bad. It turns out Wolfram Alpha uses a more exact algorithm for calculating the duration between two dates, whereas I was making the rough estimate/assumption that each month had 30 days. The ~1% difference in the two algorithms means that I "broke-even" a day before my estimate. As many people have mentioned to me, I'm not counting the value of the truck for if/when I decide to sell it. They're right, but the calculator is an estimate of how much money I've currently saved, to include the potential future earnings from selling the truck wouldn't be honest or reflective of what I'm trying to show.

Housekeeping Notes

I'm still reading through (and responding to) all of the emails sent to the address I created yesterday (brandon@TheNameOfThisWebsite.com). Give me another day or two, as you can imagine it's been a bit hectic. A couple people requested a mailing list or some way to subscribe. I currently have an RSS feed, though whether or not it works is a different matter entirely (I've never used it). I'll set some time aside this weekend to see if I can set up a mailing list or something equally useful.

In Conclusion

All in all, I'm glad my 15 minutes of fame are (hopefully) winding down. Thank you to everyone who reached out and shared past experiences or gave me tips on how to improve the truck, I read and appreciated all of it, and I'll continue to respond to emails and comments directed my way. Like I said, it's been one hell of a day, and I'm hoping to retire to my truck now for a nice, quiet night.

* _{Just to be clear, I made zero dollars off the media attention. In fact, it costs me money to run this blog, more so with the sudden traffic spikes.}

One of the perks of the truck that I always mention is its mobility. Regardless of where on the planet I put it, the box is still my room, and once I'm inside, the details of the surrounding world are reduced to nothing more than background noise. Theoretically, I can just park anywhere and make that my home for the night. In reality however, I very rarely spend the night anywhere other than a corporate parking lot, save a few digressions parking downtown after a late night at the bars. The lack of nearby, easy to access showers/facilities is a pretty strong deterrent for me. Tonight however, I find myself in a mildly amusing situation. I'm currently sitting on my bed writing this post (that's not the amusing part), but I'm almost 20 miles away from my usual hideout, and I can hear rhythmic bass thumps coming from the Quinceañera happening not 50 ft away (that's totally the amusing part).

Wait, what was that last bit? Okay, let me back up a bit.

In this post, I mentioned that I got my motorcycle license so I could get a faster electric bike. What I should have said, more accurately, was that I got my motorcycle permit and I had signed up for motorcycle lessons to get my full-fledged motorcycle license. Well it just so happens that those lessons are this currently-occurring weekend: the three sessions were this morning at 6:30 AM, this evening at right now, and tomorrow morning at 6:30 AM. Unfortunately this means I'll have to postpone my break-even party, likely until the weekend after next.

So anyway, the lessons take place in a community center, which happened to also be hosting a Quinceañera (and a wedding and maybe even a Bar Mitzvah, all simultaneously). After completing the relatively strange experience of taking a multiple-choice test while listening to pulsing traditional Spanish music remixed with Drake, I came outside to find my car completely blocked in/surrounded/immobilized by the vehicles (I assume) of party-goers. Interesting. After taking a second to assess the various facets of the situation, I formulated the following potential courses of action:

1. Wait it out. I could just wait for a few cars to leave. By the looks of this mess, I'm waiting on at least three different cars to move before there's even a remote possibility that I'll be able to maneuver my awkward hulking mass of faux housecar out of this parking lot without it getting real intimate with some of the surrounding cars. Problem with this idea is that I have no idea when this Quince-wedding Mitzvah ends. It seems pretty rowdy; for all I know they may just be breaking out the Tequilaschewitz now, and it won't be winding down until 6 AM.
2. Find the car owners. This has all the maneuverability problems of the previous option, plus I have to hunt down these people (somehow) and hope they aren't completely inebriated. And I have to consider how much everyone would appreciate some random guy running onto their dance floor with a list of license plates. Informal, one-person survey says they wouldn't like it very much.
3. Just plow through their cars. The front fender of the truck already looks like a piece of abstract sculpture, would a few more dents really matter? In all seriousness though, I didn't actually consider this a viable option…for more than, like, a minute.
4. Just sleep here. Given my inability to structure posts for dramatic effect, you already know this is the option I chose. But think about it: Do I really want to drive 20 miles back "home", wake up at 5:45 AM, and drive 20 miles back here? The much more appealing option is to drive zero miles, and wake up at 6:29:59 AM. I can wash up in the bathroom and I have all the fresh changes of clothes I need with me already. As for showering, I'm going to smell like exhaust from riding in a tight circle behind nine other motorcycles for five hours tomorrow morning anyway, I might as well just shower once I get back.

So yeah, given that list of two mediocre options, one downright bad option, and one fairly reasonable (relative to everything else in my life) option, I think I made the right choice.